Prompt: half-life.

"Let's move," Garrus says while they're flipping through extranet sites to find a gift for Jas' sixth birthday, in the precious few hours the kids are with Liara.

"Okay," Shepard says absently, tapping on the photo of a thickly feathered mask. "Where?"

"Don't you still have that apartment on the Citadel?"

"Yeah."

"What about there?"

"Sure. Pretty view."

"Shepard."

"Yes, darling."

"Look at me."

She does so.

"Your pupils are huge," he says. Shepard shrugs, her gaze drifting slightly overhead and off to the left.

"Sorry," she says. "I'm trying paroxetine now, I guess? I don't really like it. At all. God, this sucks."

Garrus' mandibles pull tight against his face. "Are you sure your psychiatrist knows what he's doing?"

Shepard snickers distantly. "No. Most of the time I think he's making it up." She shakes her head violently, clearing her gaze briefly. "Wow. I am not taking this anymore. I would rather the nightmares."

"You're so high," Garrus says, shaking with suppressed laughter despite his mingled worry and irritation. "Come on, the extranet will still be there later."

Shepard allows herself to be led off the chair, drifting languidly somewhat behind Garrus as he walks through the hallways. They end up on the verandah. Shepard sprawls over her chair once more, legs akimbo off the cushion. Garrus has a chair sent from Palaven, typically prohibitively expensive but the shipping cost had been waived. He's even got a little bottle of one of the few drinks treated with enzymes that can catalyze a switch between levo and dextro molecules. That's one of the things that remains mind-bogglingly expensive, even for the savior of the galaxy, but on occasion Shepard doesn't care to put a price on being able to share a drink with Garrus.

"I could have put myself through university with what that cost," she says dreamily, taking a sip. It doesn't taste particularly good.

"Lucky you didn't have to," he says. "Besides, aren't your, uh, earrings expensive too?"

"Yeah," Shepard says with a long pause. Her head feels like it's packed full of cotton wool. "It's a family thing, I guess. The only way a woman can safeguard herself is to keep her wealth with her...and the easiest way to do that is jewelry."

Shepard ponders on her earrings and the nose ring she hasn't worn in almost twenty years; she's acquired four more ear piercings since she took it out, though, so she counts it as a net gain.

"It's pretty outdated," she continues. "Has been for a couple centuries. But it helps me feel connected to...to the past. Uninterrupted for five thousand years."

Garrus says nothing. Shepard thinks further on her ancestors and her inability to remember words while medicated.

"That's a long time," he says at last.

"Yeah."

"And it's helping you?"

"I guess." Shepard shrugs with one shoulder, groping around on the table for a pair of sunglasses. "My great great...great? I don't know how many. Damn. Grandmother was from a place called Tamil Nadu, like way before there was the Alliance and the Sinostates and everything like that. She was the last one in my family to ever be there. It makes me a little sad."

She doesn't sound any more emotional than she had before, but Garrus doesn't comment on it.

"My clan's always lived in the same place," he offers. "But then, we've been a space people a lot longer than you have."

"Ah," Shepard sighs. "Are we about to reenact the First Contact War?"

"I was under the impression we had done that the other night."

"Yeah," Shepard snickers. "The human came out on top again."

"As I recall, it was a tie."

"Then I guess we're going to need a tiebreaker," Shepard says, bursting into giddy laughter when she's swept up. Garrus isn't much larger than Shepard is, but turian muscles have different connection points and a different density, and he lifts her without apparent effort despite the weight of her cybernetics. Her sense of balance rocks alarmingly even when she presses her forehead up against where his carapace swells outward.

"Sorry," she says. "Cute, but bad idea. Never taking paroxetine again. I'm gonna puke."

Unfortunately for everyone involved, she does. Fortunately, this leads to a shower.

"I did actually want to talk to you about something," Garrus says while they're attempting to dry off.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. My dad sent an email, forwarded it from the turian Councilor."

"Okay," Shepard says, wrapping a towel around herself with such force that it rips and she needs a new one. This has been a distressingly frequent occurrence for the last eighteen hours. She can't quite control herself.

"Palaven Command is thinking about reopening off-planet adoption," Garrus says in the same voice one would use when reading a eulogy. "He wanted us to know first, so that we could try during the probationary period in case it doesn't work out."

"Oh, that's wonderful," Shepard says, peeking out from under her bangs. She needs a haircut badly. "Do you want to?"

"Yes."

"It seemed like the question to ask. Well. Let's."

"Okay," Garrus says, looking both confused and delighted. "Right. I'll go...email my dad."

"Put some clothes on," she hollers after him, nearly losing her balance.

"You can be naked to use the extranet," he shouts back. Shepard doesn't have a response to that. She stands in front of the mirror-only looks at herself briefly, her mother would be proud to know she'd mostly outgrown vanity-to braid her hair back. Pre-war, her hair hadn't reached the tops of her ears. During the war, it had, at most, reached about her nose, when she couldn't find a bobby pin somewhere. Now, a decade later on a colony world with a surprising lack of barbershops, her hair is around her upper back. It's awful. She doubles the braid and pins the end up, the same way she does for Jas' braids. She's got a haircut scheduled for the end of the month when she goes to the Citadel for another Council meeting.

"Ah, Nora, you might want to come out here."

Tying the knot at the waist of her sweatpants, Shepard wanders into the kitchen. She's marginally more clearheaded now. She might even be able to do simple math.

"You only have one sock on," Garrus notes, though he's frowning at the terminal. Shepard shrugs, standing close enough to him to press their sides together. She doesn't think she'll ever take being able to do that for granted.

"Sorry, I know my toes freak you out. What's up?"

"He's...coming here. And he's bringing a kid with him." Garrus clears his throat, an awkward double noise. She hasn't picked up much from the few turians on Eden Prime, but he's picked up a lot from the humans. A turian in human space will never get old, Shepard thinks. "My father, I mean. He's coming to our house. To talk to us in person for the first time in a decade."

"Woah, don't faint on me, big guy," Shepard says in alarm. She's joking, but she does put an arm up, just in case. She's under no illusion that he'll drag her to the ground, one arm or two. "When?"

"With the new transit? Three days."

"Old days it would've taken six hours," Shepard says absently, running her hands over Garrus' back in an effort to ward off a heart attack or something. "But then, old days I had run of the best ship in the Alliance."

Shepard checks the clock over Garrus' shoulder. She gets yogurt from the fridge and dumps half of it into a bowl, stirring it rapidly to smooth out the lumps.

"T minus one, I'm calling it," Shepard says. Garrus still looks a little shell shocked, but he swipes up Jas when she sprints in the back door and swings her in a circle.

"I'm hungry," is, predictably, the first thing out of the kid's mouth, closely followed by, "Is that for me?"

"No, it's for Dad," Shepard says, grinning up at Jas.

"He can't eat it, right?"

Jas knows this from several experiments in her toddlerhood that, on occasion, landed Garrus in the hospital.

"No, I can't, but that means you can't eat mine," Garrus says while he gets his own gross-looking snack.

Liara comes in a moment later, Henry passed out blissfully on her shoulder. His hair, now fully grown in all over his head, is gelled into thin red cornrows.

"What did you do to my son, you animal?" Shepard asks while she gets another plate of yogurt for Liara. Liara isn't on the whole fond of human food, but Shepard hasn't met an alien in her entire life that didn't like yogurt.

"He wanted to be an asari for the day," Liara says, sounding deeply amused. She turns a little demonstrate that the cornrows terminate in tiny points.

"Oh no."

"It should be easy to wash out."

Jas tears ravenously into her bowl of yogurt after inspecting it carefully for lumps. A few moments later, bowl stripped clean, she looks up with beguiling eyes.

"No," Shepard says. "You'll still be hungry at dinner time this way."

"I'm always hungry, mama," Jas points out.

"You're going to eat us out of house and home," Shepard laughs. She doesn't give her more, but she does empathize. She's always hungry, too.

"I can do the thing," Jas crows. Shepard lifts an eyebrow and looks at Liara. She shrugs.

"What thing?"

Imperiously taking her mother and Liara each by a hand and sending Garrus a squinty look until he follows, Jas leads them all into the yard. It's almost as big as the house is, the thick grass shading into sand at the very back. There's no ocean beyond the sand; Shepard wants nothing to do with beaches. Jas stands a few feet away from them in the sand, waiting impatiently to make sure all eyes are on her.

"Ready? Ready?" she asks. "Mama, are you ready? Liara? Daddy? Henry? Ready?"

Henry doesn't move. Shepard puts her hands on her hips to crack her lower back. Jas takes a position like a baseball pitcher, a sport she's never seen played in person.

"Ready?" she repeats, sounding a little nervous. Shepard begins to worry. Jas isn't a nervous child.

"Jas-" Shepard begins, taking a couple of steps forward, just as Jas sneezes and explodes backwards in a burst of biotics, nearly knocking them over with the shockwave.

"Damn," Garrus says, already moving to Jas. Shepard catches her balance, sending Liara a sharp look, though she's immediately begun to calm Henry.

"Jas," Shepard repeats, dropping to her knees beside the sprawled little body. Jas is still skinny-legged with huge joints, pockmarked with bruises all over. She doesn't move. Shepard's heart stops.

"Jasmine," Garrus says, sounding panicked. Jas sneezes again, without the charge this time, and sits up with an ecstatic grin on her face. One of her teeth has been knocked wonky. Shepard drops her head into her hands, breathing hard.

"Jas, don't you ever do something like that without warning someone," she says into her palms. "You could have broken your neck. How on Earth did you learn to do that, you don't have an amp. Oh my god."

Shepard sways sideways against Garrus, listening to Henry's panicked shrieking fade off into senseless muttering.

"Sorry," Jas says, still scintillatingly excited about her surprise. "It's really cool! I wanted to show you. I'm just like you, mama."

"Oh, spirits, let's hope not," Garrus says. "You'll give me a heart attack before I'm forty."

"When I was at school we had a lady come talk to us about the war," Jas says. "She look like Liara but she weren't as nice and she showed us that on the blacktop."

"Why are there asari vanguards visiting a preschool on a human colony?" Shepard asks Liara, looking up from her hands. Liara shrugs, though there's a set to her jaw that says she's going to know in the next half hour.

"Jas," Shepard says, putting a hand on her daughter's shoulder. The bone is narrow and hard, bumping up into her hand. Jas' pulse is hammering. "Please don't try and do biotics until you're a little bigger. Or at least let someone teach you things instead of trying to figure them out yourself."

"I didn't try to, mama, I did."

"You are way too young to be giving the mathematician's answer, kid. Promise me."

"Yeah, yeah. I promise, mama," Jas says, rubbing at the rapidly-forming bruise on her back. Purple and red bloom under the straps of her shirt. "Pretty cool, huh?"

"Yeah, it was pretty cool," Shepard admits. She doesn't know if she's thrilled or horrified that her six year old is a manifested biotic. Shepard was almost nineteen before she manifested anything, but then, she was a latent biotic. (Or so she'd been told, but Shepard is sure she can remember a few things from late childhood that would say otherwise.) "When you were really little I'd carry you around with my biotics."

"I remember," Jas says, which is patently false.

"Should we take her to a doctor?" Garrus wants to know. Shepard shakes her head. If anyone in the galaxy would recognize a concussion before it happens, it would be Shepard. Shepard lifts Jas, who wobbles dangerously for a moment before slumping against her mother and sighing contentedly.

"Can I take a nap?" she asks.

"Sure can, kid."

Jas naps, and that night she falls asleep without any of the usual hours of fussing and baths and stories. Henry needs coddling, but that's nothing new, and he sleeps well enough once he's been patted and cleaned and there's a bottle on his night stand. Shepard backs out of the kids' room, flicking on the night light to put out a soft blue glow as she shuts the door.

Liara and Garrus are in the kitchen, each with a drink. Shepard returns to her iced tea. Her medicinal haze is gone, but now she has a pounding headache. Garrus is staring dead-eyed into dextro coffee. Liara is watching Shepard with a lightness to her expression that makes Shepard nervous.

"Hit me," she says as she sits.

"There is an entire unit of commandos en route to Eden Prime. I could get nothing more out of High Command, but I gather they are worried about a terrorist attack of some kind and the Council felt the commandos would handle it best. I will have more information within a few hours."

"God, I love being friends with the Shadow Broker."

"I'm sure it's a treat," Liara says with a faint smile. She sips her water. "The vanguard was sent to the school specifically to check on Jasmine. From that, I would assume this expected terrorist attack has something to do with you."

"Doesn't it always?" Shepard groans. Liara stays the night, since she isn't often on Eden Prime these days. Shepard dreams she is back in the war, only this run she's one of the civilian refugees. A pistol weighs heavy on her belt without any armor. Biotics don't thrum when she calls. She has only a small gun with half a clip and a terrified tiny Jas on one hip.

They stand under an overpass, Jas' face pressed to Shepard's shoulder, Shepard's back pressed to the crumbling cement of the overpass. A Reaper's points slam down and it howls over and over, crashing through the other side of the overpass and then carrying on towards a city, dimly lit in the dusk. Hundreds appear to have forgotten to pull the blackout shades, or they're too dead to return to do so. After the Reaper has passed but before the ground troops catch up, Shepard runs. Jas is tied at the waist to Shepard's chest with a man's belt, putting more strain on unaugmented muscles but lessening the strain on Shepard's shooting arm. She hasn't been this slow in a decade and a half. She draws the pistol and shoots. The ground troops have caught up.

The pistol is a Raikou with seventeen shots. She begins with nine left. Four husks fall and there is a full horde behind them. She is down to three bullets. Shepard looks down at the tear-streaked face of her toddler daughter, puts the pistol to her head, pulls the trigger. Without pausing to think about it, she puts the gun in her own mouth, and is dead before she can even taste the oil or burn herself on the thermal clip.

Shepard jerks awake without the rawness in her throat from screaming, but with the stiffness of hours of trembling. She rolls over against Garrus, who is still awake reading the news. He touches her hair, careful as always not to scratch.

"Garrus," she says hollowly. "If I was a husk, would you be able to pull the trigger?"

"I don't know," he says. "When we start shooting our allies, war becomes murder. You told me that, about Kaidan. I believe it about you, too. I really don't know if I could, Nora."

"I shot Jas," she mutters. "And then myself. It was-it wasn't good. I heard something like it over a radio at FOB, it haunted me for years. I guess it still is."

"Nora," Garrus murmurs, curving his fingers around the back of her skull when she lifts herself to lean on his chest. "You're here. You're alive. The war is over. Do you want to go look at the kids?"

"No," she says, already drifting back to exhaustion. "I never forget where I am when you're around. I love you."

"I love you, too," he says, but Shepard is asleep. She doesn't dream this time.

Garrus' dad shows up the next afternoon, only a few hours after Liara's left. He must have messaged from the shuttle, an extremely expensive and time-consuming process. Shepard is still in her pajamas. Henry has jam smeared across half his face. Jas got into the medicine cabinet again and she's got makeup all over herself.

"Antarius," Shepard says when she answers the door, somewhat dumbfounded and more than a little terrified. She's only met him twice in the entire time she and Garrus have been together-at Solana's funeral, and then at the five year memorial. "Come on in."

He does so. Garrus freezes, in the middle of applying lipstick to Jas' nose in the same pattern as his paint.

"Dad," he says. "You're, uh, you're early."

"I have important news," Antarius says, looking at the children. Shepard shrugs. She isn't sending them out. They'll only be small for so long. He adds, "And gifts."

Jas bounces to her feet and bounds to stand beside Shepard.

"Gifts?" she says, appreciably demanding. "And why you got the same face as Daddy?"

"Because I am his father," Antarius tells her.

"So my daddad," Jas concludes. Evidently satisfied with this information, she presses, "Gifts."

"For your parents, really," he says, but fishes a datapad, one of the nice ones with extranet access, out of his carry on and hands it to her. Jas examines it closely and scuttles off to the bathroom, leaving the door open so everyone can hear her watching photosynthesis songs.

"Is she typical for a human child?"

"Not really," Garrus says. "They're both their own people."

"Two?"

Henry waddles into view. He's gotten himself covered in toner from the printer somehow. He says nothing to Antarius, but stares at him with eyes the size of moons.

"I see."

"Go sit with Jas, kid," Shepard tells him. Antarius closes the door, setting his bag on the floor.

"I must ask if you're prepared for another child," he says. "I am not entirely sure, from appearances."

"As much as anyone can be," Garrus mutters.

"His name is Vahan," Antarius says. A turian toddler pops his wrinkly little head out of Antarius' carapace. He's no larger than Henry was at six months.

"Vaughn?" Shepard repeats in disbelief.

"No, Vahan."

"It sounds exactly the same."

"I doubt that it is."

"Can I see him?" Garrus asks, sounding much the same as he did at Jas and Henry's births. Shepard is sure they're going to have a long conversation later, but Garrus is already holding the kid (she's already decided he's theirs, if anything ever is) and Antarius is settling himself at the kitchen table and looking at them expectantly.

"What's this about, Antarius?" Shepard wants to know. Vahan curls himself into Garrus' carapace. He's much more comfortable than Shepard would be in this situation. He's even dozing.

"You remember the war's casualty numbers, Commander. We are talking about a situation with the potential for similar numbers, if this isn't handled quickly and carefully."

The turians had had massive casualties themselves, but were not decimated like other races. There was no pre-war civilian population in the galaxy more heavily armed than the turian. Now, everyone carries a gun.

"Insurgents glassed Elysium four days ago," Antarius says, placing his elbows on the table and linking his fingers together in a curiously human gesture. Shepard cocks her head, using the equivalent turian gesture.

"How the fuck did someone glass a planet?" she demands. "And why has no one told me? No, wait, I know why, I'm a civilian with no clearance."

"They're believed to be batarian terrorists seeking revenge for Aratoht. They are using human magnetic field generators with prototypical salarian plasma weaponry expanded upon and used on turian dreadnoughts. These modified dreadnoughts can glass an acre in fifteen seconds of sustained low orbit fire. I do not think I need to clarify the implications of this for either of you."

"Contacts in the Hierarchy, STG, and Alliance Parliament," Shepard says with a groan. "How old are the dreadnoughts? Do we know anything about their scientists? Batarians shouldn't be able to just stick weapons on a ship and call it a plasma beam."

"Quarian techs, I assume, given the level of expertise required. I believe they may be using a modified indoctrination signal-which I would have thought utterly impossible until STG agents had finished cataloguing your Illusive Man's findings. Rather fascinating stuff, the little of it I've seen. This requires a light touch, Commander. We don't know where they're going to hit next. Potentially here. You are a very high-profile target for someone with a grudge."

"And they have plenty of reasons to have a grudge," she says grimly. "Well. Guess it's time to contact the Council about once again being reinstated as a Spectre."

"Dad," Garrus says. "Did you really only come to see your only son so you could give his wife a work assignment?"

"Of course not. You're my son. I wanted to see your family. And Vahan needed a place. I trust no one with him more than I would trust you."

Shepard puts her head in her hands. She's got another headache coming.